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(*) Do you really think they'll stop firing missiles? Most countries likely to antagonize somebody with effective, field-capable lasers (large powers) are probably bothering somebody likely to remain without them (especially in the case of the US, whose forces are often deployed into an existing conflict)... so missiles won't be obsolete.

(*) There are conflicts today where old weapons -- even as old as spears and machetes -- are side-by-side with moderately old weapons (AK-47s, for instance... and the explosive grenade goes back at least to the late 1700's, as primitive explosive-charges were thrown to detonate the powder magazines in ships... and the general concept of the gunpowder firearm goes back to the late Middle Ages; RPG-7s) and where more modern weapon systems (vehicles with reactive armor, laser-guided missiles, Phalanx CIWS) are practically non-existent.

Hell, have you ever seen a Palestinian fire an automatic rifle -- perhaps a Kalashnikov or a captured Galil or M16 -- at an Israeli Merkava, when the latter is buttoned up? It's futile, as the bullets have neglible chance of finding a spot penetrable by the small rounds (/maybe/ the vision block), but that doesn't mean that they've ditched their rifles and are now swimming in RPGs.

Weapons cost time (training), money (lots), contacts (need to find somebody who'll sell... for an example of a client with problems, I doubt that the radical Islamists can readily buy modern weapon systems from the US, Russia, China, or Israeli as they are all involved in ongoing conflicts with their brethren... well, maybe they can go to France. *shrug*)

The last major weapon system concept to be completely obsoleted was probably the battleship, which yielded to the aircraft carrier battlegroup, and even now there are still gun-armed ships meant for surface engagements, I'm sure.

(*) Remember when Snopes debunked the "NASA Space Pen" nonsense"?

(remember when we spent millions coming up with a pen that would write in zero-G and the Russians just used pencils?)...

There's a page for this on the Urban Legends Reference Page.

Apparently, there are a number of problems with pencils, including the flammability of wood/graphite in the pure oxygen atmospheres that were used at that time, and that conductive graphite dust could drift into electronics and cause a short.

Troll.

False!? This sounds exactly like the story about a women stuck in an airliner toilet, carried by AP/Reuters/BBC earlier this year, which was retracted and declared false by Snopes.

While I wish that the Abi people get everything resolved to their liking and for PayPal to be dismantled and sold for parts, an online petition is not the way due to many factors which are talked about in this essay. Before filling out an online petition, it's a very good read.

You know, I really, really wish Lincoln had said this. The problem is, he didn't.

This is a rather persistant urban legend, and I'm surprised it's been modded up so far. Snopes has a debunking. In summary:

Waking the dead is an ancient custom that extends around the world and has existed in Europe for at least the past thousand years. The term refers to the practice of watching over the corpse during the period between death and burial. Partly, this had to do with making sure someone was always around in case the corpse woke up (see our Buried Alive page for numerous stories about premature interments), but the watchers were also there to make sure household animals and assorted vermin were kept off the deceased.

Saved by the bell is a 1930s term from the world of boxing, where a beleaguered fighter being counted out would have his fate delayed by the ringing of the bell to signify the end of the round. Need we mention that although fisticuffs were around in the 1500s, the practice of ringing a bell to end a round wasn't?

Likewise, dead ringer has nothing to do with the prematurely buried signalling their predicament to those still above ground -- the term means an exact double, not someone buried alive. Dead ringer was first used in the late 19th century, with ringer referring to someone's physical double and dead meaning "absolute" (as in dead heat and dead right).

Doesn't Al Gore have prior art?
</HUMOR>

(And yes, I know it's an urban legend, hence the HUMOR tags).

"If you collect the silver paper from 100 cartons of Marlboro Lights, Philip Morris will pay you a DNA screening for lung cancer shielding genes, but then you're not allow to sue them ever again"

What's really frightening about this idea is that it's probably a workeable business model.

Which of course is the reason that the japanese put their electronics industry in the city "Usa", so they could put "Made in Usa" on everything.

This reminds me of the urban legend where a guy attaches a JATO to his Impala and plants himself into the face of a cliff. Apparently the story had truthful elements, the real guy behind it did attach the JATO to an old push railroad car and it worked fairly well. So I can imagine something like that could be commercially viable with a little more advanced developement.

Since the trait is so recessive, the extinction of redheads is predicted to be sometime in the late 21st or early 22nd century...

For what it's worth, a blonde version of that assertion has been circulating as an urban legend.

I speak five languages, three of them Indian (see my siggie for more information). I understand that people like me are quite common in India; "someone very low on India's social/ literary echelon" speaks more languages than I do.

Point #2: There was a story sometime back on /. on how illiterate slum kids figured computers for themselves. One interesting result in that exercise was that the slum kids created metaphors for themselves that didn't quite correspond to Microsoft-suggested ones. ("Arrow Pointer" versus "trishul" for instance). And here's something more damning:- after the experimenter changed the English interface to a Hindi one, they didn't know how to operate the computer! All their traditional metaphors were gone; indeed, any native Hindi speaker would laugh if you say "karyakram ko bhaago" instead of "run the program". It's just too silly, a bit like Coca Cola's alleged mishaps in translating its company name into Chinese.

Bottomline: The process of internationalization as you describe it is definitely not going to work in India. People there are waaay more multi-lingual than your traditional West European or East Asian.

It's amazing how the terms of public debate on this issue have shifted towards the copyright holders. When you talk to an average joe about this they usually think there is nothing wrong with extending copyrights indefinitely, "after all it's their Mickey Mouse, they own it just like I own my car". People seem to be unaware about what the consitution says on this issue. In a more rediculous example of overly long copyrights: Did you know you could get sued for singing "Happy Birthday to You". No joke, see here. It does not run out for another 20 years!

Refer them to this site, or print off some choice pages and hand it out in class. Ask them what they think they should do about educating the public... etc.

Then you can show them this site.

After that, you can tell them that gullible is no longer in the dictionary. Hope that there aren't any who hesitate and look around before rolling their eyes and groaning.

-eg

Spend a billion to develop a pen that will write in space, and the Russians use a pencil.

I hate to be an OT stick-in-the-mud, but I've seen this jab quite a bit and I have to respond. Simply put, it's BS. Read about it here.

Great Urban Legend.

A) NASA didn't invent the pen, Fischer did, and sold it to Nasa, and it didn't cost Billions.

B) Pencils are terrible in space, all the little graphite dust gets into the electronics, causing shorts. Not a good idea on a space craft.

NASA never asked Paul C. Fisher to produce a pen. When the astronauts began to fly, like the Russians, they used pencils, but the leads sometimes broke and became a hazard by floating in the [capsule's] atmosphere where there was no gravity. They could float into an eye or nose or cause a short in an electrical device. In addition, both the lead and the wood of the pencil could burn rapidly in the pure oxygen atmosphere. Paul Fisher realized the astronauts needed a safer and more dependable writing instrument, so in July 1965 he developed the pressurized ball pen, with its ink enclosed in a sealed, pressurized ink cartridge. Fisher sent the first samples to Dr. Robert Gilruth, Director of the Houston Space Center. The pens were all metal except for the ink, which had a flash point above 200C. The sample Space Pens were thoroughly tested by NASA. They passed all the tests and have been used ever since on all manned space flights, American and Russian. All research and developement costs were paid by Paul Fisher. No development costs have ever been charged to the government.

Because of the fire in Apollo 1, in which three Astronauts died, NASA required a writing instrument that would not burn in a 100% oxygen atmosphere. It also had to work in the extreme conditions of outer space:

1. In a vacuum. 2. With no gravity. 3. In hot temperatures of +150C in sunlight and also in the cold shadows of space where the temperatures drop to -120C

(NASA tested the pressurized Space Pens at -50C, but because of the residential [sic] heat in the pen it also writes for many minutes in the cold shadows.)

Fisher spent over one million dollars in trying to perfect the ball point pen before he made his first successful pressurized pens in 1965. Samples were immediately sent to Dr. Robert Gilruth, Manager of the Houston Space Center, where they were thoroughly tested and approved for use in Space in September 1965. In December 1967 he sold 400 Fisher Space Pens to NASA for $2.95 each.

Lead pencils were used on all Mercury and Gemini space flights and all Russian space flights prior to 1968. Fisher Space Pens are more dependable than lead pencils and cannot create the hazard of a broken piece of lead floating through the gravity-less atmosphere. http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.htm

The Oliver North / bin Laden story is an urban legend, see the snopes page on this. It's debunked by North personally. He did make a reference to being threatened by a terrorist, but it was Abu Nidal, not Osama bin Laden, who was on OUR side back then.

Yes, that is what I am denying. If you've actually seen the backdrop, you'd realize that it doesn't specifically cover the statue -- it's a standard aluminum-tubing-and-curtain blue screen placed behind the podium when a press conference is given.

Snopes.com, the indispensable Urban Legends reference site, has some discussion of the matter here, and here's Jay Nordlinger on the subject, from this article in National Review:

The war aside, this AG has been swimming in bad raps. Maybe the baddest of them all has been Breastgate. Surely you are familiar with the statues that live in the Great Hall of the Justice Department: the Spirit of Justice (a lady) and the Majesty of Law (a gent). (Spirit has a nickname, by the way: Minnie Lou.) Because these statues are partially nude, they are noticed only during conservative Republican administrations. Minnie Lou and her one exposed breast became famous when photographers gleefully took their picture with Ed Meese, as he announced President Reagan's report on pornography back in the mid 1980s. The presence of the Breast was thought to have "stepped on" the administration's "message." Washington liberals are still yukking about that one today.

The Breast was pretty quiet during the eight years of Janet Reno. As one peeved administration official puts it, "No cameraman was ever at Reno's feet, trying to get a shot of her with that thing." But Minnie Lou's outstanding feature stormed back with Ashcroft. When President Bush visited the Justice Department to rededicate the building to Robert Kennedy, his advance men insisted on a nice blue backdrop: "TV blue," infinitely preferable to the usual dingy background of the Great Hall. Everyone thought the backdrop worked nicely . made for "good visuals," as they say. This was Deaverism, pure and simple. Ashcroft's people intended to keep using it.

An advance woman on his team had the bright idea of buying the backdrop: It would be cheaper than renting it repeatedly. So she did . without Ashcroft's knowledge, without his permission, without his caring, everyone in the department insists.

But ABC put out the story that Ashcroft, the old prude, had wanted the Breast covered up, so much did it offend his churchly sensibilities. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, ever clever, wrote that Ashcroft had forced a "blue burka" on Minnie Lou. Comedians had a field day (and are still having it). The Washington Post has devoted great space to the story, letting Cher, for example, tee off on it . as she went on to do on David Letterman's show.

And yet the story is complete and total bunk. First, Ashcroft had nothing to do with the purchase of the backdrop. Second, the backdrop had nothing to do with Breast aversion. But the story was just "too good to check," as we say, and it will probably live forever. Generations from now, if we're reading about John Ashcroft, we will read that he was the boob who draped the Boob. The story is ineffaceable.

Yeah, right.

a guy with weather baloons in a lawnchair? nope, I don't think so.

Snopes.com (an Urban Legends site) respectfully disagrees with you.
Up, Up, and Away!

That's an urban legend. See for yourself

NASA spends $1,000,000 plus to built a space-pen, the Russians use a pencil.

Oh, that urban legend again? Pencils are hazardous in weightlessness; both NASA and the Soviets used them at first, then both switched to the SpacePen when it became available.

Tommy Tutone did a song called Jenny(867-5309) which caused a lot of problems for some people.
It was one of the early 'hits' that made MTV.
I paged my buddy with this number recently and it took him days to figure it out.

The unemployment rate is calculated from all the unemployed people who have registered with the government, either for welfare, unemployment, or other means to show they do not have a job.

It's not the case that "the government understates the unemployment rate because they report how many people are collecting unemployment insurance rather than how many people are out of work".

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Christopher Reeve is trying to raise money for research that could help people walk and breathe on their own again. (If you go to the link, you can send a e-card to Chris Reeve and an anonymous donor will donate a dollar to in your name to Reeve's Foundation, which will, in turn, give that money out as research grants. It's Snopes approved.)

My point isn't to be simplistic and say that every dollar you own should be given away to charitable causes -- obviously, it takes a saint to live that way. But $20 grand for a motion simulator for your HOME theater? Seems like distorted priorities to me.

That's an old urban legend that still keeps circulating because NASA naysayers want it to be true. I wonder how many legislators have been influenced by that story when (dis)approving funds for NASA programs?

Of course, that story's pretty much bullshit... While there was a space pen and it did cost a fair bit of money to develop, NASA didn't put any money into its development.

Details

Google will give you links to anything you want on the web that it knows of...but you can't trust everything you read on the web...so using Google as a reference book is not the best way to go until they can provide some sort of knowledge filter or something similar to the PageRank system for qualifying certain links over others.

For the doubters who say "well, how can you trust snopes over VanHalen Links to be correct?"...Snopes references their information better.

Coke and cocaine

Are we sure they're thinking of REALLY offering a ride on the taxi, or is this going to end like that Pepsi thing?

Sorry, Slashdot stripped my link. Let's try again: he lost the case.

"Enter John Leonard, a 21-year-old business student. Upon seeing that commercial and discovering he could purchase individual Pepsi points from the company for 10 each, he set about to get himself a Harrier at an unbelievable bargain rate.

On 28 March 1996, Leonard forked over 15 original points plus a check for $700,008.50 raised from five investors for the remaining 6,999,985 points "plus shipping and handling" and demanded his jet. Pepsi laughed off the claim, pointing out the Harrier had never been offered in the Pepsi Points catalogue and was just in the commercial to provide a humorous completion to the piece."

In August 1999, the New York judge upheld Pepsi's case. "No objective person could reasonably have concluded that the commercial actually offered consumers a Harrier jet," U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood said.

As I seem to be the Snopes Whore as of late...

No, Al did NOT claim to have invented the internet.

-D

Yes, Al Gore DID say that he took the initiative to create the internet:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. on Wolf Blitzer's CNN "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999.

Even though the refrence above is from one of the apologist's sites, with the Snopes folks excusing it as "clumsy wording", it IS what Al Gore said and claimed.

Hey! Don't mock the flying capabilities of lawn chairs!

It was an unrban legend. The pictures were real.

In a recent interview, General Norman
Schwartzkopf was asked if he didn't think
there was room for forgiveness toward the
people who have harbored and abetted the
terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks
on America.
His answer was classic Schwartzkopf. He
said, "I believe that forgiving them is God's
function. Our job is simply to arrange the
meeting."

For the record, the following is to what you are referring:

http://www.snopes.com/music/media/reader.htm.

His ability was a bit more limited than you describe, and due less to a special ability to "read records" than to an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music and a nifty insight into its application.

-D

This is so fucking stupid, it has to be a hoax. The first thing I did when I read the totally childish punchline was check www.snopes.com

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mrgorsky.htm


You stupid fucking dicks will believe anything, won't you? Grow the fuck up.

This is just another urban legend that does not want to die.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mrgorsky.htm

This legend, seemingly an obvious joke, began circulating on the Internet in mid-1995 and was picked up by the media a few months later. The inclusion of specific details (e.g., the name of Armstrong's neighbor, the date of the press conference on which he revealed the meaning of his remark) apparently led some to believe the farcical story might have some truth to it.

At its most basic level, this tale is a humorous anecdote that plays on the stereotypical portrayal of Jewish wives as reluctant to engage in recreational sex (and especially oral sex). In variant forms of this legend the last name of Neil Armstrong's neighbor is different, but the name used is always a "Jewish-sounding" one, such as Gorsky, Seligman, Schultz, or Klein; the unusual word order employed by the wife in her refusal ("Oral sex you want?") is also a stereotypical speech pattern attributed to Jews. On another level, this legend can be seen as an attempt to humanize a cultural hero by associating him with a story that is both humorous and racy: Neil Armstrong, the world-famous astronaut, is made to seem like a "regular" guy.

Any doubts about the veracity of this legend are laid to rest by the official NASA transcripts of the Apollo 11 mission, which record no such statement having been made by Armstrong. Armstrong himself said in late 1995 that he first heard the anecdote delivered as a joke by comedian Buddy Hackett in California.

If the RIAA release songs which are already in the public domain, but titled incorrectly (e.g., release a repeating loop of "Happy Birthday" with the title of "Coldplay--Yellow.mp3")

Read more about it here.

If I were the original author, I should even be flattered that they'd use my work for a greater purpose, and even more if it means making something that I have only imagined become a reality.

Sorry, I don't agree. Try that when you use the likenesses of characters designed by large and powerful corporations like Disney. People are always using the "but I'm giving you free advertising - you should be pleased" line, but it never cuts any ice. You're using their work, and they don't want you to, end of story.

Stuff like this obviously works both ways, but I'm not sure I'll ever understand the "you should be happy I stole your work" argument.

Tim

Probably a lot easier than going through the trouble to fake a chicken head in your mcnuggets

He'll post part two of his Creative Writing assignment tomorrow at Noon. It'll all be on The FUD Registry by tomorrow afternoon.

Coca-Cola, Inc. announces it is discontinuing its "New Coke" line of products.

New Coke was renamed to "Coke II" in 1990. Apparently, Coca-Cola Co. still sells Coke II in some metropolitan areas.